The present invention relates generally to searching for information on networks and particularly to a computerized system and method for accessing information from web-based search services.
The World Wide Web (the “web”) provides access to information in the form of web pages. A web page is a document available on the web. Every web page is identified by a unique address referred to as a uniform resource locator (URL). A web browser is a software application used to locate and display web pages. To locate a web page with a browser, a user must know the URL for the page. If a user does not know the URL or just wants to find information on a particular topic, a user typically uses a search engine.
A search engine is a utility that will search the Internet, an Intranet, a site, or a database for terms specified by the user. search engines consist of multiple elements. A first element is a program that roams the area to be searched, collecting data and links to more data. A second element is an index of the data collected to enable fast access to searched terms. A third element is a search interface, the form in which a user enters his/her search terms and the software behind it that queries the index, retrieves matches, ranks matches for relevance and organizes the data for follow-up searches.
When a user wants to locate information on a particular topic, he or she inputs keywords in a search interface of a search engine. A search engine program then searches web pages to match the keyword, and provides an index of the web pages. The web pages found by the program are presented by listing corresponding URLs on a web page returned by search interface.
Search engines are an important method of locating information on the web, however, the results that they return can be unorganized and highly depend on the skill of the user queries, the types of words used by web page developers, as well as the search and syntax rules used by the search engine. Search results are typically displayed lone list of hyperlinks which must be sifted through to locate relevant items. In order to evaluate relevancy of each item in the search result, users have to go deep into websites corresponding to the hyperlinks in the search result. The website is displayed using the same browser window presenting the search result. After checking a particular website linked from a found hyperlink, users go back to the search result, and click another hyperlink to check the corresponding web page. The process of evaluating web page relevancy is time consuming, and because of the repeated back-and-forth linking procedure, users are easily confused and misdirected by the various web pages. Additionally, it is difficult to utilize useful URLs obtained in a previous search session. Many browser vendors provide a “bookmark tool” to maintain a list of favorite URLs considered useful by users. The list maintained by the bookmark tool, however, expands significantly during usage. As the list grows longer, effective utilization thereof becomes difficult.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method for accessing web-based search services which addresses the inefficiency arising from the existing technology.